Main menu

The Weird Week in Review

Sewer Blocked by Big Pooh

Scottish Water, a national public utility, has found some unusual objects blocking the sewers underneath Scotland over the past year. That includes a huge plush Winnie-the-Pooh bear in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire. But they say the list also contains a fax machine, a bike, a snake, and blue jeans. How does anyone get such items down the drain? But the most common objects that block a sewer are grease, diapers, and baby wipes. A new public awareness campaign hopes to discourage people from putting anything into the sewer system that will cause blockages. Unstopping the pipes costs the utility more than £7 million every year.

Selling Girl Scout Cookies Outside a Cannabis Clinic

In a genius marketing move, 13-year-old Girl Scout Danielle Lei, with her mom’s help, set up a cookie stand outside a medical marijuana clinic in San Francisco. The sidewalk in front of the Green Cross dispensary turned out to be a lucrative position: she sold 117 boxes in two hours! That’s 37 more than she sold in front of a grocery store the next day. It’s not the first time Danielle has sold cookies outside a medical marijuana clinic, although it was the first time at this location. No other Scouts in her troop have tried this method, but the local council has no problem with it. Danielle will return to the Green Cross tomorrow to sell more cookies.

Sinkhole Swallows Eight Corvettes

Of all the places a sinkhole can open up and swallow cars, would you believe it had to be in the National Corvette Museum? Western Kentucky is full of underground holes, the most famous of which is Mammoth Cave. Last week, another one was born, right under six rare 'Vettes owned by the museum and two on loan from General Motors.

Bowling Green city spokeswoman Kim Lancaster said the hole opened up at about 5:40 a.m. CST Wednesday, setting off an alarm and a call to the fire department. Frassinelli said no one was in the museum at the time.

The hole is in part of the domed section of the museum, and that area will remain closed. That's an original part of the facility which was completed in 1994. The fire department estimated the hole is about 40 feet across and 25 to 30 feet deep. Pictures of the sinkhole show a collapsed section of floor with multiple cars visible inside the hole. A few feet away, other Corvettes sit undamaged and undisturbed.

Identical Quads Born in Mississippi

Kimberly Fugate was expecting triplets, which was unusual enough, as she was about to turn 42 years old and had used no fertility drugs. But when she underwent a cesarian section on February 8, doctors found four baby girls -all identical to each other! Fetal medicine professor Dr. James Bofill says the odds of producing quadruplets without fertility intervention are one in every 729,000 live births. The odds of those quadruplets all being identical are much higher. The quads came almost 13 weeks early, and will probably remain in the hospital until May, their original due date. Fugate and her husband Craig already have a ten-year-old daughter.

Pants Take Banzai Trip to Costa Rica

Jason Anderson went all out and bought a tailored $1300 suit at Judd Frost Clothiers in Wayzata, Minnesota, for his wedding. After picking up the finished suit, he got on a plane and flew to Costa Rica, where the wedding was to take place. Only afterward did Frost discover that Anderson had left his pants behind! Knowing the large groom would never find proper replacement pants in Costa Rica in time for the wedding, the tailor was determined to ship the pants to him.

After finding no help from FedEx, UPS or airline package services to get the missing pants to the church on time, Judd Frost put his 32-year-old daughter on a southbound plane with the $500 tan gabardine suit pants.

Jessie Frost, who works for her dad’s men’s store, took off about 6 a.m. Sunday and landed about 11 hours later at the San Jose International Airport. After waiting an hour for her van driver and enduring a bumpy back-roads detour around a washout, she and the waylaid trousers finally reached the beachfront resort on the Pacific Ocean, where Jason Anderson, 32, of Maple Grove, and his fiancée, Heather Spaeth, 32, of Wayzata, are to be married Monday afternoon.

Now that’s customer service! The groom had no idea the pants were missing until the tailor contacted the bride through Facebook. The trip had side benefits for Jessie, who took her fiancé along. They attended the wedding and are visiting a cousin in Costa Rica.

Ten-year-old Norwegian Joyrider Does It Again

A 10-year-old boy from Dokka, Norway, was in the news last week when he drove his parents’ car several miles from home with his 18-month-old sister along. He had snuck out while the family was asleep. He drove into a ditch, and flagged down a snowplow for help. The boy told the snowplow driver that he was a dwarf, and had ditched the car when he turned around to retrieve his forgotten license.

It wasn’t so funny when the child pulled the same stunt again this week. The boy drove off in his aunt’s car, and the police were called. The child made it 19 miles this time, before he stopped and a bystander took his car keys away. The Vest Oppland police weren’t as forgiving for the second offense, and have reported the family to child services.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;

Also on Mental Floss:

DID YOU KNOW? Marlon Brando hated memorizing lines so much that he posted cue cards everywhere to help him get through scenes.
He even asked for lines to be written on an actress's posterior. (That request was denied.)